Finding our Home Together: Navigating the Interconnected Tapestry of Life
The home stands at the center of our lived connection to the world; yet our feeling of home rarely extends beyond the walls of our houses. What can Jewish ethics bring to an ecology of the home?
“We need to discover a common middle ground in which all of these things, from the city to the wilderness, can somehow be encompassed in the word “home.”
- William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness, in Uncommon Ground, 1995
My intention, in titling this blog “Jewish Ecology,” is to explore ideas which bring human evolution, social ecology, and historical development into dialogue; particularly as it connects all living beings together in an interactive web of interdependence. Within this web, we can find billions of humans across the world, each with their own image of what “home” looks like. To truly engage with the potential of “Jewish Ecology,” and to make sure you, dear reader, can join me on this journey, we need to begin with the meaning of “home.” Within the notion of home lies the lived sense of belonging to a place, a relationship rooted in the process of coming to know the various other beings living in the local community. The human home on the Earth has varied and changed over the past epochs; but in every case, people have lived as a group, where a particular place was comprehended as the foundation for the existence of the community. The home is the environment within which our lives are made possible. Through contemporary ecological science, we can now apprehend this broader reality: that community is extensive, our lives are interrelated with all, and our home is something we share, extending beyond our walls and rooting us in our environment.
Jewish ecology entails bringing ethics back into the domain of science. Our connection to home (wherever it may be) is grounded in the percieved responsibilities we carry as part of a shared world. Primary amongst these responsibilities is to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
But who are our neighbors? The meaning of the Jewish commandment to “love thy neighbor” has transformed across time, inspiring various interpretations as the intergenerational unfolding of history has created new tensions and insights. The meaning of neighbor — whom we live alongside and are obligated to love — has continuously interacted with the evolving ideals and material existence of community, marriage, family, self-sufficiency, and honor. Through ecology, we can gain deeper insight on how neighborly relationships come into being.
The meaning of Ecology can be derived from its Greek roots: οἶκος (oîkos), meaning 'house', and -λογία (-logía), meaning “study toward explanation.” Oikos may seem to be a peculiar word to form the root of everything “eco” we see in the world, especially when we percieve the built environment of a house as something separate from nature. But the line between a house and a home lies solely within the relationships and responsibilities of its inhabitants. We cross this line when we stop seeing a house as a commodity to be bought and sold and instead see it as the center of our lives. The ancient Greeks understood oikos not merely as a house, but as the residents of the house and all the common lands and responsibilities they shared. It is unlikely that the ancient Greeks would comprehend the term “Ecology,” but if they did, it would require them to see the human and the non-human as one community, and to recognize that existence brings us into an extensive web of interdependence. The shared “house” that we study within ecology is known by many names: Earth, Gaia, the biosphere, or simply, the living world.
A house, in itself, is merely a potential place to live. Without the loving-kindness and steadfast care of its residents, a house is not a home. But when we take the leap into recognizing the whole living world as our home, we come to realize that our neighbors are innumerable, coming in all shapes and sizes. We come to see that our life is only made possible by our fellow microorganisms, and the algae which breathed our atmosphere into existence, and who acted as our ancestors those many millions of years ago. we come to see that the plants, animals, and fungi which have collectively constructed the world — from the we breathe to soil from which our food sprouts forth — as neighbors without whom our lives would never be possible.
In the modern world, this web of interdependence is continuously woven; weaving the living world ever closer through our global economy and the great virtual forums and marketplaces found on the Internet. As the contexts of our relationships have been increasingly rendered into zeroes, ones, and dollar signs, we have lost sight of what it means to be neighborly. We have lost touch with the responsibilities we share in the collective stewardship of our environment. Home is far too often defined in terms of property ownership and exclusive claims to belonging. When home becomes a commodity and economic success becomes a requirement for individuals to house themselves, the economy no longer functions to maintain the collective belonging of all.
Today there are more homeless people on the Earth than ever before. Historically, the ownership of a private space has not been necessary to have a home. For most of human evolution, home was migratory, maintained through dispersal and movement. Wherever a people has had the knowledge and tools to acquire food and water, they could be at home. Entire cultures have been built upon these migratory traditions.
In the modern world, poor and disenfranchised people are increasingly made homeless. The historical unfolding of colonialism and empire building, genocide and capitalism, have formed a substrate rich in dispossession from which modern “Western” cosmopolitan society has flourished. This society may be rich in individual wealth (for a small number of individuals), but has utterly alienated people from any sense of obligation to our shared home and community.
Today, modern property arrangements make common possession seem unimaginable. “The Tragedy of the Commons,” an idea first presented in 1968, has since caught on within mainstream economic theory to explore how people interact with various shared environments. This “tragedy” is a result of a thought experiment which operates on the premise that all people seek to rationally optimize their self-interest, leading to the conclusion that common property is inherently unsustainable. But now more than ever, wide currents of scholars – from ecologists to social scientists of all kinds – are realizing “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a dangerous myth, steeped in the culture of white supremacy, toxic individualism, and total alienation from any real attachment to community.
By claiming that “human nature” has evolved to be exclusively self-interested, untethered from any social responsibilities or communal identity and dissociated from any care or connection to the place in which we live, Garrett Hardin, author of this “Tragedy,” misreads the roots of present alienation into prehistory. Across the world, examples abound of individuals working with others in their community to collectively share the responsibility of stewardship. While these systems of collective management still may break down under certain contexts — such as when no rules are put in place to limit exploitation or when no communal ties bind neighbors to one another — the “tragedy” of the commons is increasingly replaced by the “Miracle of the Commons.” This “miracle” arises from the understanding that humans are not inherently selfish, and that within our evolution, our greatest strength was our ability to collaborate and share a home. Our greatest strength continues to be our ability to communicate, collaborate, and collectively organize the conditions for a shared home that extend far beyond the walls of our houses.
Jewish Ecology is a spiritual discipline; it implores us to act with care to ethically live the best life we possibly can. This is a form of spirituality that roots us in the knowledge that we live as a part of a much wider world. Whereas some senses of spirituality seek ascension, leading us to reach towards a higher plane of existence (and beyond the concerns of our shared planet), this is a spiritual understanding through which our collective belonging and the essential nature of human coexistence are understood. This is a vision of human life in which the act of living is understood to be entangled with other lives, through which our neighbor’s wellbeing is recognized as a part of our own wellbeing. Here at Jewish Ecology, I aim to sketch out a vision of human life that is at once a spiritual science and a scientific spirituality. Through an integrative (and hopefully accessible) philosophy, I aspire to help you appreciate the living relationships that ground the connections between self and world, community and belonging, love and G-d. Within these relationships, we find our home. By recognizing that all beings are interconnected and interdependent, and that all living is living together, we can recognize that wherever we may find ourselves comfortable in community, we can find ourselves at home.
Broken as our shared human community might be, we all remain bound up within the environment we all co-create: this is our shared home.
I would like to dedicate this post to two individuals. The first is Martin Luther King jr., who saw the world as I’ve described it here; fighting colonialism and capitalism, fighting racism and bigotry, and yet working to build a real community. A community built on love. In a 1965 college commencement speech he gave, now known as “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” he said:
“All I'm saying is simply this: that all mankind is tied together; all life is interrelated, and we are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of identity. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
And I would also like to dedicate this post to Juliet Stephenson, who has helped me find the meaning of home within love, inspiring me to aim to reverberate these ideas across the inescapable web of interrelation. This blog would not exist without her, and I am forever grateful for her continued care and her support in challenging me to write for a broader audience. She has truly helped me try to work to mend this single garment, the cloth in which we are all a part – our home.
Thank you for reading this article! Please feel free to share your thoughts in the comment section below, I would love to continue this dialogue with you there! To conclude, I will leave you a question that I am still pondering: at what point does a wandering Jew find a home? When, after exile, do we find home anew?
I absolutely adored this post. I can't tell you how heartening it is to find your own beliefs -- that humans are not inherently evil, individualistic exploiters but communal, loving beings with the capacity for rich mutualism and interdependence-- reflected in another's writing. In a moment where many advocate for depopulation in response to the climate crisis and claim humans are nothing more than a parasite, it can feel lonely to insist that we deserve a place on this earth, too! I look forward to seeing more of your beautiful thoughts and ideas develop on this platform ❤️